I figured I’d write some fiction about a killer wolf/cat hybrid. This was just the thing to round out 2016. Enjoy!

Attack of the Wolf/Cat Hybrid

Peter slid on his stomach down the roof’s incline and pressed his palms into the soggy-leafy gutter to keep from toppling over the side. In moments he heard a belligerent scraping noise near his backyard fence. Instinctively he froze his lungs, pressed himself into the damp roof shingles. An earwig tickled with impunity along the back of his neck.

The bushes ruffled at the edge of the yard. Peter saw the golden glare of its binocular eyes before anything else. When the animal emerged, it seemed twice as big as Peter remembered from his dad’s laboratory. He pressed his lips together, made himself still. The creature had a cat’s 200 degree field of view, he knew, and it enjoyed lupine auditory acuity—it could detect a discarded penny twanging off the thump of a boulder six miles away.

Peter meant to watch the creature. Perhaps develop a scheme to brain it.

The abominable wolf/cat hybrid skulked across the sparkling dew-damp grass and then sniffed at the sun-bleached garden gnome. Seeing the animal for the first time in broad daylight, Peter noted the 150-pound animal’s regal gray coat and with ruffled accents of orange cascading along its lean flank. The animal seemed treacherously cuddleable.

Much as a hungry dog might do when sniffing for phantom food residue, the wolfcat jabbed its snout into the gnome’s various nooks and crannies. Even from up on the roof you could hear the no-holds-barred sniffing. The occasional lapping.

Then, apropos of nothing, the wolfcat started batting said garden gnome with its long font-left leg, much as an anxious cat might do when drunk on catnip, which is to say: like a boxer practicing with a speed bag. But the wolfcat was big and strong, and on the third swipe of its paw, the ceramic garden gnome parted company with its own head. Crack! From deep within its throat the wolfcat issued an unholy cross between a whelp and a roar. It sounded very wrong.

The blood froze in Peter’s veins. A muscle in his jaw twitched. When he recovered from the shock of what he’d heard, he retreated backwards from the roof’s edge, and in so doing produced an untimely scraping noise—his metal belt buckle catching on the edge of a shingle and tearing it from the roof.

“Oh no no no,” he said.

The wolfcat perked to attention, its large amber eyes fixing at once on Peter, its blood-flaked snout locking onto his scent and geo-tagging him. Even the crickets fell quiet. The oak tree muted its breezy ruffle.

Through its eery frozen expression the wolfcat seemed to convey the following thoughts: Up there lies the youngling food-humanoid who’d somehow escaped the slippery buffet at the lab corridor. The feeding-game where I opened up his irresponsible geneticist alpha and unspooled his warm innards with my hefty paws. These new smells on the breeze speak of a familial connection. Yonder is the geneticist’s pup! Delightful!

A screw of ice drilled through Peter’s spine. His breath came in fast, frenzied pulses. Abstractly he became aware of the blood thumping in his palms, the smell the tar of the damp black shingles. Get out of its line of sight you fool he thought as he pressed his hands into the roof shingles and weakly lifted himself to his knees. In this moment of terror he was ever grateful of having the high ground. The creature was, after all, way down there in the yard at least thirty feet below. Was Peter any less safe than a boy at the zoo peering down into a concrete-walled wolf habitat? He thought not.

“Watchu gonna do?” he taunted meekly once he got his feet back under him.

But this wasn’t a wolf. It was a wolfcat.

The beast compressed into a spring-loaded squat, and with a single impossible bound it was—WTF?!?—on the roof with Peter, about five wolf-lengths away. Peter had felt the roof quake before he even registered what happened. Then he watched as the creature used its long nimble tail to keep balanced on the slanted surface. Its yellow eyes disappeared into anxious, hyper-reactionary black orbs. It hadn’t yet made the decision to strike, but it made itself ready—front end pressed low tot he roof, hindquarters raised into the air, long striped tail draped low to the roof. The pointy fluffy ears hardened like upraised scoops.

Peter became as motionless as the now-headless garden gnome 30 feet below. To him it seemed the impact of a single twirling leaf shard would ignite the wolfcat. His fingers trembled as he inched them, ever so gently, towards his jeans’ back pocket. Ahead, he could hear the wolfcat making a steady, high pitched sex whine, through which oscillated a canine snarl.

At last Peter’s fingertips pressed into a cool puck of metal. In a single motion he removed and brandished before him the can of White Albacore Tuna (in water) which he’d so brilliantly snatched from the pantry before ascending to the roof. The metal flared in the morning sunlight, throwing a twitch in the wolf cat’s eye.

Didn’t matter. No need to be sneaky now. Peter smiled at his own intellect. Here was a treat the monster’s cat-genes (the majority of its genetic material) could never ignore. The strong secret omega-3 oily smells which travel impossible distances at unheard-of speeds the moment they’re released into the world. Fish > Steak.

“Hunter-beast perfection maybe,” he thought. “But a regular human jerkwad still trumps you in the brains departme—“ He cancelled all further thinking when he realized that he’d, yep, forgotten a can opener.

And then he felt the roof shake and the weight of the beast was on him. Glistening inside a hot spray of blood, the can of tuna wheeled down the roof and plopped down a succession of asphalt tiers—pa-click, pa-click, pa-click— before dropping into the gutter, cushioned by the damp leaves.

So Peeps, for those not in the know, I like to pretend I’m a professional writer (although in reality, I’m just a boxer wearing gnome with no impulse control and an overwhelming need for attention.) At the end of my writerly day, I reward my professional self with select reads from my fellow pretenders, but I rarely publicly comment on a colleague’s work because I figure that’s a task best left to the unbiased professional consumer (a.k.a our literary audience.)

Any-hoo, I was on Twitter the other day, checking the profiles (I always check) of those foolish enough to follow a profane gnome (there’s a mute button and I’ll never know you’re using it… just saying,) and one of the fools, @PracSerious announced their thirteen page read was free on Amazon and politely requested (on their own profile) readers to give a try and maybe leave a…

Okay guys, my serial killer short story “Green Thumb” is free today and tomorrow. I’m really trying to get my review- and/or rating-count to 20, so I can use a few more. It’s a quick read and has been well reviewed so far. Please help out!

They call the serial killer “Green Thumb” due to his quirky habit of leaving small potted plants at the sites of his abductions. Michael will soon learn what that name really means.

After an ill-advised mission to rescue his brother from Green Thumb’s lair, Michael only succeeded in adding himself to Green Thumb’s list of victims. Now he must free himself and his brother from the killer’s bizarre torture chamber, where an insane collection of impossible plants suggests a terrifying new meaning behind the nickname “Green Thumb.”

They call the serial killer “Green Thumb” due to his quirky habit of leaving small potted plants at the sites of his abductions. Michael will soon learn what that name really means.

After an ill-advised mission to rescue his brother from Green Thumb’s lair, Michael only succeeded in adding himself to Green Thumb’s list of victims. Now he must free himself and his brother from the killer’s bizarre torture chamber, where an insane collection of impossible plants suggests a terrifying new meaning behind the nickname “Green Thumb.”

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Pick up my well-reviewed short horror story published through Amazon Direct Publishing. Please show your support by downloading a copy (100% free!) and, if you can, giving it a quick rating on Amazon or goodreads. Every little bit helps!

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In today’s morsel of Trivago Guy fan fiction, Trivago Guy must overcome a triple-threat of distractions threatening to spoil his mission to buy a belt online.

I’ve kept you guys waiting long enough. It’s finally time for the third installment of my epic 5,000-word Trivago Guy novella “Trivago Guy Buys a Belt (Or Does He?).” Enjoy.

Trivago Guy Meme Fan Fiction Part 3: “The Lure of Churritos”

Hours whipped by like silvery Trivago-commercial graphics and still, no easy solutions for Trivago Guy’s quandary presented themselves. Trivago Guy’s gray rumpled shirt stuck to his lean chest, which was grossly beaded with sweat from yet another blazing hot day in the San Fernando Valley.

Outside, a portly Mexican street vendor wheeled by with his taco cart advertising his greasy goods by ringing a rusty bicycle bell every so often. A gaggle of scruffy looking children, who’d been playing tag in the street, rejoiced and skipped over the taco man and started fishing into their pockets.

For the first time since his unfortunate encounter with Harry222, Trivago Guy wrested his bloodshot eyes from the computer screen. Elsewhere in his apartment building, somebody yelled something and threw something against a wall. Trivago Guy smiled at this, then leaned over and peered out the window and, for a good five minutes, stared out at the taco cart with a doleful expression on his face. If you were out there on the street looked up towards Trivago Guy’s apartment you’d swear you were looking at a child molester scanning for prey.

But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. Trivago Guy was not staring at the kids. He hated children, if you must know. Of course he did. Whenever he encountered children during his rare jaunts to the nearby 7-Eleven, they’d usually give him a weird look, scratch their chins as if deep in thought, and then articulate a laundry list of terrible, unfiltered observations about him. Usually about how somnambulant and Scott Bacula-like he looked. Kids have no filter, and for that reason Trivago Guy feared them deeply and completely.

Today, Trivago Guy barely even knew the taco cart kids were out there. He was too distracted by the plastic bags of orange, wheel-shaped churritos. These happened to be Trivago Guy’s second-favorite snack food after Kool Ranch Doritos. As he listened to the taunting chime of the vendor’s bell, Trivago Guy’s stomach rumbled like crazy and he dug the heels of his Adidas flip flops into the frayed gray carpet, which was so frayed primarily due to churrito-related heel digging.

But this was no time for a snack break! This was not ideal! Trivago Guy needed to figure out what to do about Harry222, if anything, so that he could finally get back to the day’s timely, critical business: buying a belt before the neighbors turned off their Internet connection. In a few hours the neighbors would undoubtedly unplug their wireless router, as they always tended to do in the late-afternoon. And once his connection to the Web was severed, all hope to buy a belt before the end of the day would be lost, dooming Trivago Guy to a most un-ideal life of incompleteness and sadness and mysteriously beltless slacks. Trivago Guy would stew in post-Internet darkness for the rest of the night. Therefore he could afford no distractions.

Ring ring. The churrito vendor, now serving a taco to the leader of the children, somehow managed to continue ringing his bicycle bell despite the fact that both of his hands were occupied in the making of the taco. But Trivago Guy wasn’t observant enough to realize that he was witnessing a miracle—the Los Angeles equivalent of water being turned to wine. No, he was simply thinking about the bags of churritos. He wanted them so bad.

His next-door neighbors finally finished having loud sex (Oh, I forgot to mention, Trivago Guy’s 60-year-old neighbors had been having loud sex in the background since the very beginning of this story). Minutes were flying by like seconds. So many distractions! Harry222’s cyber-bullying continued to eat at him. The churritos continued to taunt him. The neighbors who’d just stopped having sex at the beginning of this paragraph, now started again, louder than ever.

“Enough!!!” shouted Trivago Guy. He took a deep cleansing breath. Then he collected himself, moved his mouse icon to the “X” box at the top left of his browser’s window, and, without further incident, he clicked. The dreaded Trivago Guy Fan Page forum disappeared from the screen of his ancient Gateway computer. And yes, it really stung him to let Harry222’s final comment go unchallenged—which kinda validated it, in all fairness—but Trivago Guy’s thing was this: What good was a sterling online reputation if he didn’t even have a belt? The belt was the key. To everything. And once the danger of distraction was past, a fresh wave of excitement and determination flushed through Trivago Guy’s lean, highly tanned body. Let’s get this thing done!

So I’m planning on peppering Zombie Planetfall with new “blog posts” written by Spacekid. They’ll shed some light on what was going on up on that space station before the astronaut left and came back to Earth. What do you think?

This week we premiered the new, alternative cover for “Zombie Planetfall.”

Perhaps you were wondering if there were actually any zombies in my zombie serial novel? Okay, yes, there were a few at the beginning, but since then it’s been a lot of radioactive hillbillies and feral children. Well folks, today is your lucky day. Head on over to “Zombie Planetfall” on Wattpad and there’ll be more than a few zombies (cadavers) waiting for you. There will be blood.